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I mean, locals can be resellers too!

I can't tell if this is a joke or not

The headlines about 30% are the product today, and when the stores open some other headline will be the product. The groceries are besides the point

the store you will trek to for that is costco

I doubt their prices will be lower per-unit than Costco, and Costco is a lot easier to park your delivery van at; you get a discount for having a membership and buying in bulk and neither of those is a problem if you're doing this for resale anyway.

The idea is that the stores will charge 30% below the market price for some food products. If the market price for milk is $6 ($8 + $4 = $12, $12/2 = $6), a 30% discount leads to a price of $4.20. That's not going to affect the $4 store, and presumably the customers of the $8 store don't know/care.

Rich outsiders? No. Shop owners willing to cart staples 3-4 blocks so they can resell them? Yes.

The congestion pricing is just for part of Manhattan.

well obviously, which is why the first step is OBVIOUSLY Ending Capitalism. we told you that already! simple.

Maybe we finally will have to show an ID (with a local address) to buy veggies!

in the UK, you will very frequently find that cornerstores* buy up product from supermarkets, break them down, and sell them individually, and the margin is not even that large. *New Yorkers, other places have these too, you're not special

This is how you get eBay scalpers - remember the baby formula shortage?

30% under the undiscounted shelf price is still above wholesale for a lot of SKUs

Put a 3 item limit on all products.

'the very first thing you are going to want to do, for instance, is put a limit on how much people can buy" But, based on the experience of every socialist country, this -rationing of food & other staples - is an unavoidable feature of socialist markets! Therefore, it must be a desired outcome.

Supermarkets in Britain have done this for certain products. If you go to a corner shop and see products with Aldi packaging on sale, you're going to be able to figure out where prices are lower.

presumably you arent selling below the price of other businesses wholesale connections? Grocery stores just do not have the kind of frictionless arbitrage you imagine for this to be a threat.

When someone asked how mom & pop groceries will compete with a city-run store selling at 30% below market rate, I saw someone else unironically respond that other grocery stores can just buy their supply at the city-run store for the lower rate. 🤦‍♂️

Look my enjoyment of people going hungry is a hobby that has nothing to do with policy. It’s why I take candy from babies

Yeah, I found that to be the most compelling argument, but as was pointed out in another thread, the proposed first location is literally around the corner from an ordering supermarket.

I’m with you, there’s a really big “maybe” attached to every prediction here. NYC is weird and complicated, and Manhattan especially so.

It’s not even travel cost, it’s travel convenience and time. I wouldn’t ride the subway for 30 minutes (a low estimate) with 6 bags of groceries, some of which may be perishable, to save even 30% on total costs, when I can walk to a supermarket that is 3 blocks from my house.

No, the money savings for perishables isn’t there for all but a tiny outlet. Now things like canned soda pop? Have 100% seen restaurants buy retail loss leader promos because they were cheaper

hey all disrespect but maybe maybe if you have to google "grocery store margins" (also, lmao, try 2%), you are perhaps not equipped to discuss this topic

this is absolutely a thing people do on a pretty regular basis! less so in New York than in like, Wisconsin, but in particular it's highly attractive if you're doing anything on scale.

The grocery situation in NYC is really sui generis, though. If you look at the Gristedes weekly ad listing you see that the baseline prices are crazypants even by 2026 standards. order.gristedes.com/store/griste...

And to think this out in a context I’m familiar with (Chicago) it would be like opening a grocery store in Englewood and worrying that folks in Lakeview or Fulton Market might shop there. They won’t. Even the wealthier people in Hyde Park wouldn’t go.

Ok imagine the scenario where they build one in each borough. They have the capacity for say 30K customers/week. The catchment range of let's say 1mi or a 15 minute walk in NYC is exactly that - 29K people at standard NYC density. If one thousand people come in from outside the catchment - or God

yes exactly

and it's not system-gaming in the sense of 'oh this person doesn't deserve x', it's more that the ways you can exploit the system break the system for everyone.

Also, if the goal is to provide targeted discounts to the poor, a city-run grocery store ensures there's at least a few places that won't engage in the kind of fuckery you see in the US around SNAP and the like.

This approach didn't work well in the Soviet Union apparently. They kept miscalculating/misallocating resources.

Some system gaming is a positive though. Suppliers gaming the system to gain access to other markets in the city for example.

There are reasons why the cheapest shop, pub (Wetherspoons) or any other business doesn't drive other competitors out of business, or lead to the kinds of imbalances posited in bsky discussions on this matter. Price is just one motivator, and not always the most important, even for low income people

90% of our poverty problems break down to “these people don’t have enough money” and I’m disappointed that the left is joining the right on the idea that just giving them money isn’t a solution.

See also rent control versus building more housing.

For all the jokes on here about Universal DoorDash, a city-backed expansion of Meals on Wheels to serve food deserts in the best transit city on the continent is honestly a good idea.

The grocery stores can fix the food deserts problem but this is exactly it, the actual solution to grocery prices for the poor is just to increase financial aid for food.

I would like most of the dumb rules removed and it being a secret farm subsidy is very odd but giving people money directly is probably never politically happening. The american public is addicted to means testing in some form.

Cash transfers are even better.

Even better than food stamps would be just giving the same amount in cash.

one of the other contributors to Not Having Enough Food is a lack of accessible stores selling it